Lenovo's Thinkpad X230 came out in 2012, putting it just a few months shy of vintage in the fast-moving world of tech, where any random guy's definition of vintage can prevail for the course of a single posting. Here's an X230 upgraded with a transflective Pixel Qi display, completely legible in full sunlight. Even better: creator PC DOODLE made several more and is selling them on eBay.
It's got a transflective screen in it. You can see the sun is nice and bright—and so is the dang screen. Holy crap can you ever read what is going on there!
There have been a handful of off-the-shelf laptops with nonemissive displays, the latest and best being Lenovo's own ThinkBook Plus [Amazon]. The E Ink company, which holds the relevant patents on E Ink, is apparently conservative about licensing the tech and no Hacker News thread about it can pass without a lot of ire directed at the lack of new products. Pixel Qi's displays are another matter, but sadly the company is no more.
